Having somehow missed the previous incarnations of the Brewfest in World of Warcraft, I did the various quests and activities related to that holiday event this weekend. That netted me a bunch of tokens, leading me to the "token redeemer", where I could buy rewards for those tokens. And I noticed that, like many holiday events, some of the rewards wear items of clothing without stats, just for the looks of it. And I don't know what you do with your holiday event clothing, but apart from a rare christmas hat, I always destroy all of the clothes at the end of the event because they take up too much valuable inventory space.

I used to also delete non-combat pets for exactly the same reason. But nowadays pets don't take inventory space any more. So I spent my brewfest tokens on a pink elephant. Which made me think that the fluff clothing in World of Warcraft could be much improved with two changes:

A wardrobe tab on your character sheet, which works exactly like the pets and mount tab, and stores all your non-stat items of clothing you collect from various events.

An option to *display* your character as wearing that sort of non-stat clothing, without having to actually remove your gear that gives stats. Just like you can use a hallowed wand or Noggenfogger elixir disguise and look like a skeleton or pirate without actually having to remove your armor, that functionality would let you display your holiday clothing without you having to change clothes when you want to fight.

Without that sort of functionality, I'm not all that interested in the various event clothing rewards. By blocking inventory space they end up feeling more like a burden than a reward. After removing keys and mounts and pets from our inventories, a wardrobe for World of Warcraft non-stat clothing would just be the logical next step.
- posted by Tobold Stoutfoot @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link
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I love minipets and fancy dresses in WoW. I would just fill my bank with rare pets (no room for four 10s cats) and put a few in my inventory.

But clothes were even worse on your bag space. Let's say you just got a fancy new dress. To wear it you don't just need one slot for your robe. You need that slot plus enough slots to put in all your regular gear. That will easily take up ten slots. I rarely had ten slots left just to show off my new robe.

I like your concept. A small online gaming company (SOE) has had the same idea. In Vaguard your character sheet actually has six tabs for clothing: Advernturing gear, harvesting gear, crafting gear, diplomacy gear, mounts (not really clothing; your current flying and non flying mount with extras such as saddle, horseshoe, girdle etc.) and "appearance".

The gear displayed to the outside world usually depends on your occupation but you can also fix the tab to "appearance" depicting you as wearing whatever you put in that slot, however the actual stats of the other gear applies to the respective occupation.Personally I like to have a kind of "uniform" look. Therefore I use it to show a matching set of gear head to toe wereas in reality major pieces have been replaced with upgrades. But I've also seen some funny maintanks on a raid depicting only robes or even a fluffy shirt. That used to irritate me.

But still it's not axactly a wardrobe as you may only carry one axtra of each (shoes, trousers, shirt, gloves etc.).

Like the appearance armor feature in EverQuest II? Yeah, I had no interest in non-stat items before that either. Now I work as hard for some sets just as much for their looks as their stats. Not sure why WoW hasn't copied this feature yet; Lord of the Rings Online has.

That would all be fine if it couldn't be used in PvP, as it is in LOTRO. It's hard enough to see race/class as it is today with all the pirates and skeletons running around the battlegrounds. You know, there is a reason why people use it a lot in PvP, to confuse.

Um Vanguard had it before LoTRO, the release date for Vanguard was January 2007 and had been pushed back several times. LoTRO came April 2007, just saying all games end up borrowing from others. Who had it first is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, who does it best is the question.

Indeed, it does need this. Any item that does not have combat stats and is strictly to be used for appearance should have something similar to mounts/pets where you can add them to a list of known items. Or give them their own tab, like keys and tokens.

Appearance items like LotRO for the RPer's would be fine, but I just want a place that stores stuff like holiday gear and tabards and such.

They also need to fix the token tab to hold older pre-Wrath tokens, along with a bag for quest items that expands as needed.

WoW may be turning five soon, but there is still a ton of work to be done on the game. Blizzard is very slow to making changes.

As a small but not-quite-irrelevant remark, LotRO's cosmetic outfit feature differs slightly but significantly from what Tobold is asking for. The difference is, that the outfit tabs do not actually physically hold the gear, plus there's only two of them. Only the appearance of the item gets saved to your outfit, the item itself remains on your bag. Sure, you can sell it or throw it away and keep the outfit, but, remember, only two outfit tabs. Thus, if you want to actually keep the outfit, you're cluttering your vault space once again.

LotRO outfits are only disconnecting looks from stats, while the need for a wardrobe becomes, arguably, even more pressing (a little bit like dual-specs suddenly made everyone feel like they need 5 different specs, when before everyone just had their layout and dealt with it).

*still remembers how their main-tank, a massive male guardian, once stopped at the door of the Balrog prison and turned around to the raid wearing a white wedding dress, a beaver mask and wielding a pitchfork .. OH THE HORROR*

To put the honour where it's due it's a quite recent addition to Vanguard and LotRO may have been the first to implement it. Although (unlike LoTRO) the SOE concept seemingly takes it one step further and really frees up some inventory slots.

Personally, I’m not sure why WoW Holiday-specific garb isn’t stored under the corresponding Achievement. In the case of Brewfest, for instance, just track the items you ‘own’ and give an option there in the Achievement to equip the item (such as a right-click drop-down).

What I would like to see as well is a capability to ‘save’ the ‘skin’ of an item in a ‘wardrobe’. Let’s say you get a BOE green item, a head-slot item that has a Red Pointy Hat skin that you’d like for your mage. Right-click to ‘save’ the ‘skin’ in your ‘wardrobe’ under ‘head slot’. You leave your head-slot item equipped (such as your T8.5 helm) and you activate your ‘skin’ for the slot and that is how it looks while keeping the stats of the base item.

Excellent suggestion. Hopefully the wardrobe will include items such as my 2007 vintage (Yellow) Brewfest Stein, which along with my Brewfest garb I wore and drank from with pride on opening day. Always generates a few whispers - "Where did you get that yellow stein?"

LOTRO does it well, but only 90% perfect. You still need to keep the clothes banked. You can destroy them and still keep the look(s), but then if you change the slot to another item, you lose it and cannot switch back to the former one of the meanwhile deleted item. Correct me if I am wrong here since I play LOTRO only very rarely these days.

A Wardrobe, keeping the look of items forever even if you destroy the item, would be the 100% perfect solution. It could have an additional option to really delete the look as well, in order not to overflow.

EQ2 has appearance items but also mannequins, which seem to be what you're looking for. You can use the mannequins to display all your items in your house, dress them up however you like to show all the cool stuff you found.